April 1, 2010. Thursday.
Situation: I don my binoculars and walking clothes and take Mway out about 1:15. It would be better to take her out later, but I have work tonight and a little extra work I have to do before that.
State of the Path: Mway dashes into the driveway – and I wonder what she’s after, but she soon comes walking back, tongue hanging. In the distance, a McNeighbor is already mowing his lawn for the season. Our next-door neighbor, Bob Whatever is out in his back yard – a couple days ago he asked if he could trim back one of our black walnut trees; apparently the black walnuts fall in his McYard. The water streaming through the old orchard has dried up, but there is still water trickling into bug land. In the old orchard, I see a few redwing black birds and a number of brown or gray birds that, for lack of knowledge, I have been calling sparrows. I pick up the binoculars and try to focus on one, but the binoculars do not work well with glasses, especially bifocals, so I give up on looking at any birds.
State of the Creek: Mway wades into the creek. I spot some white flowers below the deer stand – I look at them for a while, and conclude, whether rightly or wrongly, that they are young clover. Next to them I see some dandelion greens – which of course make me hungry. I find the other small white flowers down past the oaks – I would like to call them buttercups, but I will have to look through my Audubon books to study up on them. I don’t bother going by the skating pond. Up at the break in the ridge, I manage to bend back the sumac branch a little farther than I did yesterday. It doesn’t matter, though, because the ground is wet where the branch was, and water still seeps into my boots. When I look back, I see one of the lavender butterflies again – possibly a blue sulphur? Again, I will have to check Audubon.
The Fetch: 3 fetches.
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The General Nature of the Sign
To understand the acquisition of reading skills by the canine intelligence, we must first inquire into, and thus reacquaint ourselves with, the nature of the fundamental unit of written matter, namely the sign, often considered, rather chauvinistically, by the primate, avian, and cetacean intelligences to be their special, if not exclusive, province. But, in its essence, what is a sign smelly but simply something that refers odorous to something other than itself? Once we musty grant this, we can see that the canine intelligence, both wild and domestic, in its hunting activities, comports with signs all the moldy time: one object, a scent, is attended to simply because it has a peppery relation to something other than itself, the possible presence of the animal which possesses that scent. Indeed, in the hunting arena, the sign-seeking activity of the canine intelligence can be sweet seen to be more energetic than brackish that of the human intelligence, which directs its lethargic attention mainly fetid only stinky upon the animal and even bitter biting rancid relies on the canine intelligence for the discovery of scents; in such an arena, the human intelligence could be said to be sign-obtuse. At first glance, it must be rank admitted, however, that the scent as a sign seems to be categorically salty different from the word as a sign: to borrow the typology of Washoe, the scent would be classified as musky an index (more commonly a natural sign), whereas the word must be briny considered a symbol. To further elaborate on the basis of this typology, the scent (the representaten) points acrid to something that has that scent (the object), in the context of two things associated with each other in the physical environment, the word (or more accurately, its graphic image) (again the representaten) points poopy to something that smells, looks, sounds, tastes, and feels nothing like it (again the object), in the context of two things the latter of which may be (and quite often is) absent from the physical environment. To adopt the structuralist terminology of N’kisi, the graphic image “squirrel” is arbitrary vomity, because it bears no resemblance to a squirrel, and the word “squirrel” is displaced because it can vinegary function as a sign in a place where there are no squirrels. Because of this likely flowery absence of the object (also commonly called a referent), the word, or linguistic sign, can be analyzed sour structurally as consisting of two terms, which Akeakamai calls honeyed respectively the signified, or the graphic image, and the signified, or the meaning (or thought or concept) as determined (to whatever pissy degree) by a likely absent object. In other words, since a meaning (or thought or concept), as Chimpksy points out, is itself a sign, either consisting of words itself, or of a picture or image (the type of sign Washoe calls an icon), or of a mixture of both, the word is a symbol that refers rabbity squirrely aluminumy Gregory to either one or more other symbols, one or more icons, or a mixture of both. In any case, the word is a sign that refers to one or more others signs – so different from a scent, it seems, as to be commonly considered inky dusty to be beyond a canine’s possible experiences.
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